Can I Be a Digital Parent if My Child Knows More About Technology?

In today’s episode of Digital Parenting Live, we answer a viewer’s question about whether its possible to be a digital parent if your kid knows a ton more about technology.

Transcript

Hey guys, and welcome to Digital Parenting Live for May 17th. We’re going to talk about a couple of questions today that actually viewers sent in, and we’re also going to hit on a couple of other important details about some things that we’re working on here at digitalparenting.com. So, excited that all of you were able to join us today.

Now, I want to go ahead and jump to it, because one of the first questions that we have is a very, very common one that I get here at digitalparenting.com, so let me go ahead and bring that question up.

So here’s this question, “What do I do when my child knows so much more about technology than I do? Can I really be successful as a digital parent?”

I feel for these parents that are in this situation, because they feel like in a lot of ways no matter what they do, their child is always going to be one step ahead of them. So here’s the first thing I would encourage you with, yes you absolutely can be successful as a digital parent. Now, how are you going to be able to do that? Well, there’s a couple of things. First is you’re going to have to be able to, again, work with a trusted advisor. And I’m not talking about hiring somebody, what I’m saying is you can leverage resources like digitalparenting.com so that you don’t have to go out and learn a billion new things to be able to keep up with your child. That’s the way you’re going to be successful. You’re going to be able to understand what platforms your child is operating on, and then understand how are the ways that you put in some reasonable boundaries.

Now, let’s talk a little bit here about the different areas you might be in. You might be here as a reactive parent, so you might have a child that knows a lot about technology, something has happened, you’ve realized now that it’s a problem and you’re trying to go in and put some things in place for that. That’s we’d call reactive. Some of you here are going to be more on the proactive side, where you’re looking at it and your child knows a ton about technology, but there haven’t been any problems that have come up. Nothing that you’ve had to address in the same way. And so you’re going to be coming at it from a bit of a different angle.

Now, I will say this, you will have to go a bit of the extra mile if your child knows a lot about technology. Let me give you some examples, I know there are some parents that have discovered that their child maybe had access to a computer in the home or another device that was connected to wifi, where they thought they had some restrictions put in place, and their child found ways around it. And one of the things you will have to do if you’re in that reactive mode is you’re going to have to go to extremes in some cases to just help be sure there are some reasonable boundaries in place for your kids. And we’ll be providing some resources on that in the weeks and months ahead.

But let me give you an example, a lot of parents are using the circle router, that’s one that we actually recommend as well, we’re going to be posting a lot of information on that in the weeks ahead. And one of the things is I’ve had parents say well we put that in place and yet our child seems to find a way around it. So one of the things that parents that are reactive in that mood have had to do in some cases is, if their child could just go behind them and unplug it from that router, and plug the internet directly into another device, or into another router, they can find ways around it. So parents in that end just have to go the extra mile, and that’s something where you might even eed to lock some of those items up.

But, I realize a lot of that seems daunting if you’re a parent that’s already worried about your level of expertize. Here’s what I would say, you can go in right now, and in less than a minute through our Digital Parenting Minute episodes, you can learn a lot of which you need to know for basic platforms like IOS and Android and Xbox and Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video. You can put some basic controls in place. And if we can do it in less than a minute, you can just sit down, you can watch that thing as much as you need to, to really understand how to control that.

So that’s what I would say, again, these things aren’t all that hard if you just have a little bit of time to dive in and look at it. If that’s you, you can go to our website, digitalparenting.com, either right on the front page, or you can to blog and then go to Digital Parenting Minute, and you can watch those episodes, and hopefully through that gain some confidence that yes, you can be successful being a digital parent.

Now, just a reminder here, if you have questions, we want you to send them to us. So send them to questions@digitalparenting.com, we’ll get to those in each and every episode, we’ll be answering your questions that you have.

Just another few things I want to throw out, first is we’re going to be over the next couple of months, we’re continuing to build out what’s going to become the studio for this show. So we’ll be showing you guys some clips of that, you’ll be able to see some of that if you’re following us on Instagram. So e sure you’re following us there, we’re just Digital Parenting. You can check us out, and again, we’ll be continuing to evolve this show, we’ll be adding in some live guests, we’ll be adding in a lot of other aspects to that in the weeks and months ahead. So we are excited that we’ll be adding that in.

But we thank you guys for joining us today on Digital Parenting Live. Be sure to send in your questions and we’ll see you guys next week.